Santa Maria delle Grazie is one of the oldest churches in Voghera. The first record dates from 1153, in a bull of Pope Anastasius IV that mentions a settlement of Benedictine monks. The present church is due to the Dominicans, and in particular to the work of Vincenzo Bandello; it was consecrated in 1511 with a dedication to Our Lady of the Rosary. The Friars Preachers stayed until the Napoleonic suppression of 1805; there followed a period in which the building served as lodgings for the carabinieri, then as a stable and store for the cavalry. The Franciscans, who arrived in the nineteenth century, finally obtained the convent in 1927.
What to see
The church shows only its left side, because the apse and the other side are absorbed into the convent, and it has an unusual orientation: the entrance faces north-east, towards the town. The façade, in Lombard Gothic style with terracotta decoration, is marked by four buttresses; the two central ones correspond to nothing inside and seem to be there to frame the rose window and the portal. The stone portal bears an inscription dated 20 April 1523: according to one scholar it was not made for this church but was brought and reassembled here.
The interior has a single nave, with wide pointed arches opening onto fourteen chapels, seven on each side: with the presbytery they make fifteen, like the mysteries of the rosary. On the triumphal arch is a fresco by C. Secchi, of 1941; the altar and the rearrangement of the presbytery, begun in 1989, are to a design by Father Costantino Ruggeri.
Visiting
The image of Santa Maria delle Grazie is venerated in the choir. Opening and Mass times should be checked with the convent.
Our editors' tip
The venerated image comes from another church, that of the Observant Friars Minor at San Michele in Albofassio. When excavations for the provincial asylum began in 1876, tradition has it that it was saved from destruction by the pleas of the daughter of the market gardener of Santa Maria. In this convent, moreover, Antonio Michele Ghislieri, the future Pope Pius V, took the Dominican habit.
